At 03:37 AM Tuesday 5/24/2005, David Land wrote:
"It�s one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person
who claimed divine revelation, but it�s something else entirely to have,
as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up
by a very nonprophetic human being."
"It�s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and
then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it."
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16700_1.html
Well, here's someone with a different idea (forwarded from another list):
<quote>
Medical student prescribes a religion
... for freethinkers on an 'alternative' path
By Greg Garrison
RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
June 2, 2005
Religion News Service
Ford Vox is the founder of a movement for "the faithless community," which
has drawn 7,500 interested people.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. � Ford Vox started a religion in his spare time.
He calls it Universism, and is recruiting atheists, deists, freethinkers
and others who can rally around the notion that no universal religious
truth exists, and that the meaning of existence must be determined by each
individual.
Vox, a University of Alabama at Birmingham medical student, says
Christianity, Islam and to a lesser extent other world religions are
harmful because they attempt to impose their own version of moral
certainty on others.
"Religious faith is very powerful," Vox said. "It is so powerful that it
is dangerous. It's very difficult to find an alternative to that."
Vox said he started Universism in 2003, and has drawn about 7,500
sympathetic souls who have signed on through his Web site, universist.org.
It also drew the attention of the evangelical Christian group Focus on the
Family, which has studied it as part of a course on different world views.
Chris Leland, director of Christian worldview studies for the Focus on the
Family Institute, said Vox has become a voice for the latest wave of
skeptical deist philosophy.
"This group seems to be a neodeistic group in the vein of Thomas Paine,"
Leland said. "The interesting thing about this group is it has cast a much
broader net."
Leland has had hundreds of students at the Colorado Springs, Colo.,
institute analyze Vox's Web site as part of their Christian studies of
other philosophies.
"Every worldview, every ideology, every perspective has absolutes," Leland
said. "There are still some absolutes for even most of the members who log
on, whether they admit it or not."
But Universism has "brought an amazing diversity of people together in
terms of numbers," he said. "The fact they've had Focus on the Family and
(scientist) Richard Dawkins as online guests says something."
Universist activities include e-mail and online discussions on how to
define the relativist philosophy of their "faithless community."
"We absolutely reject absolute truth," said Vox, who envisions organized
Universist communities like churches.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, well-meaning non-religious
people can no longer stand by and do nothing, he said. They need their own
religion, he said, one that opposes absolute truth claims.
The Sept. 11 hijackers derived their political motivations from their
faith, Vox said.
Vox, who expects to earn his medical degree next year, grew up in
Tuscaloosa, Ala., as a Presbyterian. He said he sees aspects of religion
he likes, such as the sense of community.
"They have such great social infrastructure," he said. "Secular people are
missing out on that. We'd kind of like to take part."
But Vox knocks even open-minded liberal churchgoers.
"Unitarian Universalism is belief in anything for the sake of belief," he
said. "There are many people in liberal Protestant churches who share this
attitude. They continue to prop up the legitimacy of religion, making it
seem an OK precept because you have rational people who continue to call
themselves Christian."
The Bible should be treated as literature, not history or revelation, Vox
said. "We would treat it like Shakespeare; people can learn from it like
any great story," he said. "We want people to continue exploring in a
religious realm, but do that safely � an individual sitting down, thinking
about his own view of the world."
Universists are safe seekers, he said. "They are not the result of
reference to a theology, to a prophet, to an outside revelation," Vox
said. "You can't share a revelation in Universism. It's your own personal
experience."
After he becomes a doctor, Vox plans to remain active in promoting
Universism. "I definitely want to make this part of the rest of my life,"
he said. "It's a futuristic-type project. The future has to be different
than the way things are today."
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050602/news_lz1c02vox.html
</quote>
-- Ronn! :)
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